A reason to resize O.C. cities

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Part II: Whither Rossmoor.
Yesterday: Unincorporated Rossmoor is trying to acquire the quasi-city power to contract for police. The bigger issue is, what form of governance should Rossmoor take?

Depending on my mood, my idyllic city is either Mayberry or Manhattan. Neither makes economic sense.

The Mayberrys that try to provide citizens with every public service can't do so with the same efficiency as a medium-sized city that has the advantage of economies of scale. But at some population point, a full-service city begins to
lose efficiency. This is mostly because municipal workers in large cities command higher salaries than those in medium-sized cities, even if they do the same jobs, because wages are set by comparing wages in like-sized cities.

Somewhere in the vast, hazy middle between Mayberry and Manhattan is the most economically sized city.

Some scholars say that at 20,000 people, cities are as efficient as they can be. The economies of scale remain flat to about 250,000, at which point a city becomes less efficient. On the other end of the spectrum, some scholars contend that cities become more efficient as they expand well up toward 1 million.

None of this would matter if cities still had the luxury of being inefficient. Most no longer do.

In the wake of the recession, mounting pension liability and the loss of redevelopment money to the state, we're seeing California cities struggle as never before. Four have declared bankruptcy since 2008. In Orange County, Santa Ana has closed its Fire Department and outsourced; Westminster laid off 67 workers; Stanton, running a $2 million-a-year deficit, shut off water to parks.

How is this relevant to Rossmoor? Well, not only shouldn't Rossmoor become its own city or acquire citylike powers, but it should be thrown into the mix of the possible cost-savings solutions for the rest of the troubled cities in Orange County.

I know this sounds like last year's supercity proposal – a merger of Seal Beach, Rossmoor and Los Alamitos – that went nowhere. It went nowhere not for fiscal or legal reasons; it went nowhere for political reasons. People can be intransigent when it comes to erasing borders and drawing new ones, even when it is in their best interests. Their biggest fear is of losing local control over the powers that most dictate property values: zoning, public safety and schools.

Voters will only go for consolidating cities if they believe in their guts it will enhance these powers or
that their existing power will be diminished if they
don't consolidate. That's a real possibility when cities budgets are collapsing around us; 23 of 34 Orange County cities outspent their budgets in 2010.

At the same time, voters won't be bullied by a top-down plan. Anything so radical must emanate from as close to the grass-roots as possible, with citizen buy-in from every level of the community.

This type of buy-in has been successful in some consolidations around the U.S. These all involved combining city and county governments into one giant super city-county government. Louisville went from population 256,000 to 602,000 overnight by merging with Jefferson County. Indianapolis became the 11th largest city in the U.S. by merging with most of the rest of Marion County.

This idea has been (gently) floated in Orange County. But as daunting as merging a few cities would be, creating a city-county would be impossible here. We're simply too fragmented for any one city to form a critical political mass.

Where a city-county has been voted in – and it's only been successful 13 times out of 73 attempts in the past 90 years in the U.S. – there's been a single dominant city that was the focal point of political and economic power. That's not the case in Orange County, where our largest city, Anaheim, is just 11 percent of the overall population and power is shared with our county seat (Santa Ana), a business and higher-education hub (Irvine), the wealthy coastal communities, etc.

Also, if the scholars are correct, a too-large city is as inefficient as one that is too small. But there are lessons to be learned from those successful city-county mergers.

Tomorrow: How some modest-sized supercities might be achieved in Orange County – and how Rossmoor fits in.

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